Speaker 1: 0:01

What's up everybody. Welcome to another episode. This is your Uncle Vinny, coming to. You live from Jersey.

Speaker 1: 0:10

Lots of stuff been going on lately, man, really cool stuff. I was down in Florida recently. I visited my business coach and, yes, I'm a business coach that has a business coach. I'm a business coach that has a business coach. It's probably an important thing to do, but I spend a full day with my guy down in Orlando, florida, and we spend an entire day mapping out the business and the things we're going to accomplish, and it's been something I've done with this same coach, paul Goff, since shoot 2018. I like longstanding. I usually stick with people for a really long time and they don't let me down. I don't leave, and he hasn't done that yet.

Speaker 1: 0:49

Really good, lots of cool stuff planned, big plans coming up for the March mastermind. March is the big one, the one we do every year that we have a pretty blown up theme that I'm super excited about. This year I'll be announcing the theme soon. Can't announce it yet, but while I was down there, too, I was able to visit two Mastermind members that both had gyms in Florida. Great catching up with those guys. So, yeah, a lot of cool things flying around. I have the Green Monster that I'm training for I did it last year which is a 50K hike through the mountains of Pennsylvania. I'm doing that with my buddy, joe Hasse, so I've been training hard for that. Big shout out to my friends over at Allie Gilbert's company, silverback. That's been helping me get prepared and I'm feeling good, feeling strong, and so today what I'm doing is to actually, before I get into today, there is something I'd like to share with you. So we you guys know, still know that I still own my gym and it's one of the cool things that, since I still own a gym, I can test things and see what works and see what doesn't, and it's something that I really enjoy.

Speaker 1: 1:58

And one of the things that we did at my gym recently was raise the price and full disclosure. I've helped hundreds of gym owners raise their prices, but it's been a while since I've raised the prices at my own gym and we did it and some cool things happened. We raised the price by a pretty good amount. So we charge around 400 to $500 a month. Majority of people are paying about $400 a month. 400 to $500 a month Majority of people are paying about $400 a month, and so I did a 12 and a half percent increase, which equates to around $49. And so that's not a small chunk of change for a rate increase for $49.

Speaker 1: 2:36

Now some interesting things happened. A couple people reached out and they one of the things I did and I do this with. Whenever I do something like this, like a pricing, I always put my cell phone in there and you think like the whole world's gonna text you, like they're not. But I did have a couple people reach out and they texted me and they got on the phone with me and they said, hey, I totally get it, I know, I understand it, it's so worth it, but I just lost my job. But I just lost my job. Here's the situation. And I was able to work with them.

Speaker 1: 3:16

And the cool thing is, even despite the price increase and it was a chunky one even despite that, it was a telltale sign that my gym is doing really good work. And I just called the guy that runs my gym, mike, and just told him I was like, hey, man, the reaction to this price increase no one's celebrating about it, but everyone's saying it's worth it. And now will there be probably people that cancel, like a month later, I think. So I think there'll be like a small handful of people that will. But anytime you do a price increase, you got to have some expectation that is going to happen, and we did the math that, if that happens, we're still well ahead of the game and it allows us to take the money and invest in staff and invest in the facility and all of stuff like that. A price increase is one of the most powerful things that you actually can do and something I'll talk about in a second here. But yeah, so it went really well and it was cool getting on the phone with. I've had very little to do with my gym for a long time, and it's been a long time since I've talked to really any clients, and so it was cool to catch up with people and talk to them. Even if it was a situation of a price raise, it was. It was a pretty cool, a pretty cool situation to do it.

Speaker 1: 4:18

What I'm talking about today I'm talking specifically to gyms that are doing under $25,000 a month. Okay, that's who I'm talking to today, and I think that's a lot of you, a lot of you, and the cool thing is that some of the most successful people that have gone through my mastermind started well below $25,000 a month. I think that one of our most successful members, a guy named Giancarlo, he started with us doing $7,000 a month. Another guy, john Dougherty, he started with us around doing the same $7,000 or $8,000 a month. Jason Maher actually didn't even have his gym open when he started with us. Bobby Casita, who's speaking at the next Mastermind he was doing about $7,000 a month. So what I'm here to tell you is if you're below that point one, you're in good company. A lot of people that I've worked with that were at that level are now doing big money. Everyone I just mentioned is doing over $50,000 a month and many doing well over $100,000 per month. So you're in good company if you're there.

Speaker 1: 5:22

But there's some things that I want to highlight for you to do Some things for your business. Of all, right, if you're below 25K, what are the things that you should be doing? What are the things you should be focusing on? Okay, so here's the first one. I want you to focus on acquiring more customers. Okay, now, I know you're like duh Vince. I want you to understand this first. I know you want to get more customers, but if I was to look at your schedule and look at the amount of time that you're spending on acquiring new customers, would that match up?

Speaker 1: 6:03

There's a lot of dads out there and say, yeah, I love my family, I want to be a great dad, yet they don't see their kids at all. And so are your actions backing up what you want? And I have happened to find that a lot of times. If I do what's called a stopwatch check on a gym owner and I'd be like, all right, how many times or how much time per day are you spending on acquiring new customers on the marketing and on the selling side of your business? How much time are you spending? And most of the time the answer is not enough, and so sometimes it's not even the strategy, it's not even like what to do, it's just making a commitment to do it more, to spend more time on that thing. That's going to help bring you.

Speaker 1: 6:43

But that is the X factor of scaling getting from where you're at 7K to 25K, to past 25K. It really is about acquiring more customers, because if you're below 25K, you probably have I don't know anywhere from 20 to 50 clients, depending on how much you're charging, and so for you. You don't have a big issue with churn yet you shouldn't at least you shouldn't, because if you do the math on 50 clients and you have a three to 5% attrition rate, you're losing like a couple people a month, if that. So your churn is not usually going to be an issue if you're doing a good job.

Speaker 1: 7:22

The issue you run into is acquisition and getting new customers, and the problem is sometimes we focus on the wrong things. We want to build systems, manuals, we want to go to all the training seminars, we want to overdo it with the one staff member that we've got in terms of teaching them everything and stuff like that, and at the end of the day, your time is best spent on focusing on getting new customers. There's this gym I'm not going to mention what it is or where it is, but I'm not sure how to do this but there's a gym that sometimes I go to and the trainers are always doing things like cleaning the equipment and making sure everything's straight and everything's perfect, and there's never any time spent on getting on the community and acquiring new customers. It's all about what's happening on inside of the gym and that is not going to be the thing that grows the business. The thing that's going to grow the business is you spending active time on acquiring new customers.

Speaker 1: 8:32

Okay, here are a couple of ways to do it. One, the first way and this is one of the things I used with Giancarlo and he took my search program and basically I gave him this idea to give every one of his customers a card to give to a friend, and the card was like for a 30-day membership and he gave it to all of his clients and he ended up getting 25 clients in three and a half weeks. He was like it changed his whole business. It was like crazy how fast it actually worked, right. And so for many of you that are starting out, you're below 25K. What you have built is you have this thing that a lot of us that have mature businesses maybe don't have as much, and that's everyone wants to see you win. Everyone wants to like, help you out and do the things. So a lot of times, if you ask people for referrals pending, you do a good job. When you're smaller, they're more apt to give it to you. So take that opportunity and take those ideas and ask your customers for referrals. And one of the things with referrals too, is don't just ask your customer for a referral, give them an actual gift. Actually, it's funny One of the people that I had to talk to about the price increase.

Speaker 1: 9:47

She was concerned about the price increase, right, and she wanted to stay, she loved it, she was concerned, and we have this thing where, if you send a referral to GFP, we give you a free month. And so I told her to do the math. I was like, if you send us one referral over the next 12 months, if you take that comp month and you divide, that's the exact same amount, pretty much the exact same amount of your increase. I was like all you need to do is send one referral. She was like, yeah, but I know, but it's like really hard to refer people to you because you guys are really expensive and I have a tough time telling my friends to come to your gym because it's so expensive. I was like don't do that. Here's what you do. You take this card, okay, and this card is for a free month, and now you don't have to sell your friend on this huge membership that you got to get. All you got to do is give your friend a gift, and so it's the act of giving your clients tools. It's about making it easy for your clients to refer. That's going to get more of your clients to refer. So don't say just ask for referrals. Give them specific tools to help them make the call for you to give you a referral, okay. So that's one thing to do.

Speaker 1: 11:01

The second thing to do is to look at all of your past member lists and make them an offer to come back and I love this one. And even if you're below 25k maybe you haven't been in business that long, but maybe you have, I don't know and so what you do is you take the list of all the clients you've lost, and I was with one of the guys in Florida and he has a large group business, so he's got a higher volume of people coming through the door Right, and we took all of the people that he lost. We took his churn rate and we took all the people he loses per year and it was like ended up being like almost 300 people, because he was in business for a few years and I was like, dude, this is, this list is the best asset you've got. You just have 300 people where you have their address and you have their phone number and you have their kids' names and you know everything about these people. Now all you got to do is reach out with them with some kind of an offer, and my preference is give them their first month free. Okay, I want you to come back, but end your first months on me. I think that's a really powerful way to get new customers back.

Speaker 1: 12:08

But so what we're doing is to get to 25K. We have to start working on the money-making activity. We have to start doing things that are going to ring the register for our company. If we're not spending time on this stuff, it's not just going to happen. It's like you go fishing, the fish ain't jumping in the boat, right, you got to put the pole in the water, and all these things I'm telling you about are poles in the water. And another thing is like all right, we don't, maybe we don't get new customers, but this one is about leveraging how much your customers are spending. Right, there's three ways to grow a business. One get new customers. Two, get your customers spending more money. Three, get your customers to stay longer. Right.

Speaker 1: 12:47

And so this one is can you ask all of your clients doing twice a week to do three times a week, and the way to do this is to make it a habit, and at the first day of the month, what I want you to do is I want you to just pick 10 people 10 people that are current members are doing twice a week and it could be once a week for you, whatever. I'm just saying one more and ask the people that are doing twice a week if they'd like to try a month on the house of three days a week and then talk to them about the benefits of three days a week and at the end of the month, sit down with them and be like, hey, how did you like that? And then sell them on the three-day membership. It's like one of the most simple things that I think people can do to increase the amount of money that they're making per customer, because that's what you ideally. What we're trying to do is we want to increase the lifetime value of a customer. We want to increase the amount of money that people are spending with us and obviously, if we're providing more value, then we should feel good about the more money. We're not just asking them for more money, we're providing more value. So that is the two-day week to three-day week one.

Speaker 1: 13:55

Number six is and I did this recently with two different gyms, one in Florida, one in Long Island but it is to rearrange your current gym and your equipment to be able to safely and effectively train more people in the same hour. And so the example is if you have a gym and right now you say, oh, I can only train four people per trainer, there are probably things that you can do in your gym with moving stuff around that can get you to train six. Now, personally, I don't really suggest going much over six if we're doing traditional or true small group personal training like it's outlined in my book. So I really do believe six is a sweet spot. I think more than that you're barking up, you're getting. I think more than that you're getting a little greedy and I'd rather see you raise the price than just add more people in a group. I do have some people testing seven. Just add more people in a group. I do have some people testing seven, some people testing eight. I think it can work. I think that long-term I prefer six with a higher price point from there. I've helped people make a lot of money with this one tweak and this one change. So look inside your gym and be like dude. Do you have a freaking preacher curl that's taking up all the space that needs to be moved to be able to get another person in there? That's going to pay you X amount of dollars per hour every time. So that's another one.

Speaker 1: 15:17

Another one is follow up with every unconverted lead that's come in the past 90 days. So you have leads hopefully coming through your website. You have leads coming through your. If you're running Facebook ads, you have leads reaching out to you through social media. Whatever leads you've gotten, reach out to them and go back 90 days and just go back.

Speaker 1: 15:40

I think a lot of people they think if, oh, they didn't buy right away, so they're not going to buy. No, that's not the case. People don't buy right away. Most of the time, people are very indecisive. I'm sure some of you listening to this have people some of you listening to this have things in your Amazon cart that you haven't purchased yet, and it's just the nature of humans, right? So don't think that if they don't buy right away, that they won't buy in the future. And I would be going back 90 days, if not more, and reaching out to those people with an offer and sending them some kind of an email hey, are you still interested in hiring a personal trainer? Or something along those lines.

Speaker 1: 16:17

But my point in all of this is and then the last one would just be raise the price. Now there's a couple things you need to do. We raised the price at my gym because we had a 1.5% attrition rate so far this year, like unheard of. We majority of our new clients are coming from referrals, meaning our clients are sending their friends to us. Our conversions are really solid in terms of when someone sits down in our consult room, they're converting to a member. I think it's between 80 and 90% right now. Right, and so we had the green light to raise our prices.

Speaker 1: 16:58

And what you don't want to do is if you're doing a crappy job and you're not making enough money because people are leaving, and then you raise your prices because you're not making enough money, that is not a good reason to raise your price. I think you should fix the product first. But if you have a good product, if you have good retention, if you have a good close rate, your market is screaming at you saying you can charge more money, and you should, because that is one of the fastest ways for you to get past 25K. If you're stuck at seven, you're stuck at eight shoot one price raise. If you're stuck at seven, you're stuck at eight, shoot one price raise. I believe that the price raise at GFP it will increase our recurring revenue by between seven and $8,000 a month, depending on if we lose anybody. Probably go down a little bit, but at the end of the day, it's a very lucrative move for the business, right?

Speaker 1: 17:48

Start to think about a price increase. Start to think about do I have the stones to raise? And that's the thing that always comes back to you Do you have the courage to do it? Because most people don't raise price because it's just it's me getting these calls. Like I didn't love getting those calls, but at the end of the day I knew it was what I needed to do to be able to make a move like that for the business and it was the best thing for the business.

Speaker 1: 18:07

So you got to be able to stomach a little bit of people being upset with you, and I think most of the time there's some people that were upset, but most of the people that I talked to were like it's totally worth it. I get it. I get what you're doing. It's just really hard for me and it went like that. That's how the conversations went, and so I think what we do is we build up in our heads.

Speaker 1: 18:27

When we do a price increase, we build in our heads. It's like everyone's going to quit, everyone's going to hate me, they're going to call me a greedy pig and like for pigging out on me. It's just, it's not going to happen. And if it does happen, if someone does, if one person does call you that way, whatever, they probably weren't going to stay anyway. So, at the end of the day, a price increase is the most lucrative thing that you can do for your business. It's just the one. Have you created the right environment to do it? Meaning, is your attrition rate good? Is your close rate good? Are the people liking the product? Do you have a good reputation, all that stuff. And if you do, go for it and try to bypass all the head trash that you got in your head to be able to do it. But you can do it, man.

Speaker 1: 19:12

I'm telling you right now, like I've had and there's this narrative of these business coaches out there that are telling gym owners not to raise their prices and never to raise their prices on current members. It's such bullshit. It's, it really is. It's not a, it's not good advice, it's really not. And there's.

Speaker 1: 19:27

I only say this pretty convincingly because I have had so many people in my group. I've got 150 members in my group. Okay, I don't know exactly offhand how many have raised their prices, but it is a lot and there's not one person that I can think of that came back and was just like dude, I can't believe I did that. That was the worst advice you ever gave, not one person. So I say this from experience.

Speaker 1: 19:52

I don't just say this because I'm trying to be like contrarian to other coaches out there and stuff like that. I'm just saying this because I care about you and I care about your family and I want you to make more money and I want you to get past 25K and not be stuck at 10 and not stuck at 7. And if you've earned it, a price raise is the way to get some really serious momentum. So, as I said, it's not for everybody, but, man, it is the thing that is going to move the needle the fastest and the thing it takes the most is just some courage. So those are just some insights, but I think that the overarching theme that you need to get past 25K right to go from 7K wherever you're at if you're at 7K, if you're at 10K, if you're at 12K, wherever you're at right now the overarching theme to get there is focus on making more money and whether that's increasing the average of what people pay you, whether that's acquiring more customers.

Speaker 1: 20:54

But it's you having this mindset that you're waking up in the morning thinking what am I going to do to get this business more money and how am I going to focus on that and what do I need to? Here's another thing what do you need to stop doing? What do you need to stop doing? What do you need to stop doing? What are the things you're spending most of your time on? That is getting in the way of you spending the time on the money-making activities for your business. That right, there is the focus. That right, there is the focus. And if you want to start scaling past 25K, if you want to get out of this 10K rut, this 12K rut, this 15K rut, and you want to get past the 25K, and the techniques and the tactics that I gave you today are some things that will help.

Speaker 1: 21:39

Okay, but at the end of the day, it comes back to looking at your calendar. And did I spend time on the money-making activities that my business needs to be able to get past this level? That's really, honestly, the most important focus that you could have right now. So there you go, that's what I got, and the cool thing is I have this new thing that I'm doing and I realized that it was a big stretch for guys doing 7k to come right into mastermind and, as much as I wanted them to do it, there were some times where guys would come to me and they're doing 7k and I almost I'm like. I was like I don't want to sell this. This guy Like I don't want to put a big bill on his back, and I knew that the mastermind would help him get where he needed to be.

Speaker 1: 22:28

But in certain cases, some people joined at these low revenue months, like these low revenue, like 7k, 9k, and they got stressed out by how much the mastermind actually cost, and so one of the things that I've been working on with my team is like all right, how do I get these people that are at five K, seven K, nine K, and how do I create something for them that's going to get them the result they want to get past 25 K. Where, at that and at that revenue level, anyone doing 25 K, if they have decent margins for what we charge for Mastermind? Most people are like it's totally cool, it's totally fine, but if you're super below that, you're super behind. Sometimes it can be a thing right. And so we created this new coaching program and it goes for 60 days and what we do is I take the things that I think will work the best. What are the things that we can implement in your business that will move the needle the fastest for you?

Speaker 1: 23:26

And what we do is, in the first call, in the first day, what we do is we pick two to three things for you to do, and sometimes that could be a price increase, sometimes that could be launching an ad, sometimes that could be a reactivation campaign. But after doing this for as long as I've been doing it, we have this menu of stuff. I think it's like probably 14 things that we've got that are like hey, if you implement two to three of these things, you're probably going to get past 25K pretty quickly, right? And so what we do on the first call is we select the things based on where you're at right. We look at your resources, we look at what you have at your disposal and we're like all right, dude, this is it. Now, if you have 10 members, the price increase. Yeah, it'll help a little bit, but it's not going to help like a huge amount. If you have 10 members, we like to, we got to just get more members, we got to do. And so what we do on the first call is we sorry I said that three times is we help you develop that plan and then the rest of the time we're helping you implement everything.

Speaker 1: 24:27

And the cool thing is, like, a lot of times these programs are like oh yeah, go run a six-week challenge. That's do you know what emails to write to run a six-week challenge? Do you know what landing pages to use, do you know? And the thing is, we've done this thousands of times and we've created this massive resource database that makes everything easy. So, one, we're going to, we hold your hand the whole time. But two, it's there's documented stuff that's going to save you tons of time. Plus, like, we know what works and what doesn't. Don't take this personally, but an email that I wrote personally is probably going to do better than an email that you wrote, and if you have no experience with email marketing, right, or take a Facebook ad. If I give you a Facebook ad copy of one of my best ads that I've ever run, after my guys tested it thousands of times, it's probably going to work better than something that you're going to come up with if you haven't run ads before. And so basically, we have all this stuff loaded up in our vault, and so it's basically this plan.

Speaker 1: 25:30

In the beginning, the key is picking these two to three things what are these needle movers? What are the things that we need to do to move the needle the most? And then we hold your hand over the course of and it's one-on-one, it's a combo of one-on-one and group stuff, but we hold your hand over the eight weeks and then we implement it and we work with you to do it, and it's a much smaller investment than joining Mastermind. It's not. It's only a 60 day program, it's not an annual program like Mastermind, and so we're super excited about this. We feel like we're going to help a ton of people that maybe want to join Mastermind but just aren't ready yet and want our help to get them past that 25K mark. And again, that 25K mark is just whatever it's just. What I've seen is, once people get past that mark, there's a lot of momentum that builds and stuff like that. So if you're doing like 24 or 26, like you probably still can do the program or something like that, so that's what it is.

Speaker 1: 26:24

There's a link in the show notes. Just click the link and there's an opt-in form that you can fill out to get more information and book a call with one of my guys and they can help you. But this is we haven't really had something like this before. I've done the six weeks new client service program, but that was a thing that I only ran a couple of times a year, but this is like a new thing. We've invested a lot of time and a lot of energy in getting this program launched and getting this program ready and I think we've nailed it. I really do. I think we've nailed the.

Speaker 1: 26:52

What are the things that GM owner needs that doing under 25K? What are the three to four things or two to three things that this person needs to do to bring the register and scale past 25K in 60 days. So that is what, and again, I sell you on this. I'm talking about it, but at the end of the day, I'm honestly just excited about it because we're going to help a ton of people doing it. So if you're interested in talking to us about this program, if you're under 25K and you want my team's help to help you get to the next level, click the link in the show notes to check out, to book a call and we'll take it from there. So hopefully some of this was helpful. I will see you soon, peace.